Recollections of Irish have broad appeal

Every life is a story, Julie O'Keefe McGhee likes to say. The proof is in Transplanted Shamrocks: Recollections of Central Ohio's Irish Americans, a book of family histories.

Every life is a story, Julie O'Keefe McGhee likes to say.

The proof is in Transplanted Shamrocks: Recollections of Central Ohio's Irish Americans, a book of family histories.

It was compiled by McGhee, a storyteller and retired teacher, along with J. Michael Finn, Anne O'Farrell DeVoe and Kathryn Hess.

The reading is uneven - some contributors simply recite family genealogy - but gems stand out. And the details of economic desperation, hopeful ocean journeys and hardscrabble lives in a new land ought to resonate. Substitute Russia, Korea, Somalia, Mexico or - in my case - Italy for Ireland, and these are the ancestral stories of almost all of us.

It's just too bad that most families don't have a letter writer of Michael Toolen's caliber to document the tale.

The most arresting passages in the book come from the 19th-century letters of Toolen, a young Irishman who would let nothing - including the Atlantic Ocean - keep him from Maria, the woman he loved.

Toiling in a brickyard in Britain, he knows only that she left Ireland for America several years before. When he finally obtains her address, he doesn't hide his feelings.

"If you are married, then adieu to all happiness for me on this side of the grave," he writes on May 12, 1862.

On July 21, he writes again, ecstatically quoting from a letter that Maria sent him in return: "I have always loved you. I will never love anyone but you."

By early 1863, he has arrived in America and married Maria. But soon he leaves their home in Indiana to look for work in Cincinnati and, again, writes letters expressing his longing for her and his discouragement at being jobless.

The Peter Shanahan family, which contributed the letters, picks up where the letters leave off, writing that Toolen eventually became a successful merchant in Indiana but died young of an unspecified illness.

The book also contains the familiar voice of Mike Harden, my column-writing colleague at The Dispatch who died in 2010. He contributes a long passage about Mike McGahan, his bank-robbing great-uncle.

The McGahans, Harden writes, were "shanty Irish, the famine immigrants driven from their home country less by politics than potatoes. A million and a half fled Ireland during the dark years, coming to America to help dig the canals, which - because of the mortality rate in those festering holes - came to be known as the 'Irishman's grave.'??"

Such circumstances, McGhee said, often embarrassed immigrant families, who wanted nothing so much as to forget hard times. Even now, descendants of those families sometimes sidle up to her and whisper that they have no stories to tell, because their ancestors suppressed the details of their poverty.

"That's what gets me," she said - "when I see the stories not being passed on."